Anatomy of Dissent

Abstract

Based on findings from ethnographic analysis of U.S. climate scientists, this article identifies largely unrecognized sociocultural dimensions underpinning differences in scientists’ perceptions of anthropogenic climate change. It argues that culturally laden tensions among scientists have influenced some to engage with the antienvironmental movement and, as such, influence U.S. climate science politics. The tensions are rooted in broad-based and ongoing changes within U.S. science and society since the 1960s and propelled by specific scientific subgroups’ negative experiences of the rise of environmentalism and of climate modeling, in particular. Attending to these and other experience-based cultural dynamics can help refine cultural theory and enhance understanding of the deeper battles of meaning that propel climate science politics.

Keywords

sociology of science climate change science controversy antienvironmentalism

In a public presentation I attended during fieldwork in 1994 at a U.S. atmospheric research institute, a prominent climate scientist and governmental advisor warned an audience of atmospheric scientists to “Choose carefully [their] adjectives to describe the models. Confidence or lack of confidence in the models is the deciding factor in whether or not there will be policy response on behalf of climate change.” He was referring to General Circulation Models (GCMs) which project future climate impacts resulting from human emissions of so-called greenhouse gases.¹

For the same reason, GCMs are also a central focus of the backlash coalition’s campaigns to undermine climate policy (Lahsen, 1999). Backlash actors dismiss the importance of GCM projections of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). In the words of a representative of the neoliberal Cato Institute whom I interviewed, “The computer models predict all kinds of horrors and costly environmental consequences. But there is no data! This is a computer model.”²

To promote their agenda, powerful backlash actors have frequently adopted deceptive strategies to create the fictitious appearance of broad grassroots and scientific support. Nevertheless, through the years, they have managed to draw on a small but not insignificant number of PhD scientists, including a subset of environmental scientists. This is evident in a recent compilation of scientists who have appeared in backlash television productions and signed open letters or declarations expressing skepticism of climate science and associated policy initiatives (see Anderegg 2010).

The role of powerful vested financial interests and political elites in the antienvironmental backlash, and their reliance on a dozen or so “contrarian” scientists to shape public opinion and policy making, in the U.S. especially, is well documented. Analyses tend to highlight the financial interests and the conservative values of the actors involved (Oreskes & Conway, 2010; Dunlap & McCright, 2010). Based on ethnographic research of US climate scientists and politics spanning over a decade,³ this article identifies additional cultural dimensions of scientists’ divergent positions related to the science of ACC. It argues that backlash instigators’ success in enrolling scientists in their efforts has been facilitated by subcultural tensions among scientists. These tensions reflect divergences in scientific training and life worlds. They are rooted in divergent experiences and evaluations of the social, material, and scientific consequences of the rise of the computer-based numerical models and of the environmental concern about anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Criticisms of climate models pervade the articulations of contrarian scientists as well as those of a subset of lower-profile, mainstream scientists whose skepticism tends to be overlooked in the current popular and sociological literature on climate science politics.

Two particular subgroups of ACC-questioning mainstream scientists that emerged from my research among atmospheric scientists were two kinds of research meteorologists: the (by definition physics-strong and theoretical) dynamicists and more empirical research meteorologists with past training in synoptic methods and weather prediction. A third group is formed by weather forecasters. For reasons rooted in the particularities of their knowledge, experience, and subcultures, especially older members of these groups tend to be critical of models. Their critical perspectives are conditioned by their scientific training and practice, which have given them reasons to doubt some of the pronouncements made on the basis of GCM output and to thus be critical when modelers appear overly confident of model output. Older members of these subgroups have often experienced a relative demotion or, at least, a reduction in their access to research funds relative to those using numerical climate models. Aside from expertise-derived insight, alienation in response to these changes and the associated, broader transformations in science and society in recent decades underpins the skepticism espoused by members of these subgroups. Alienation and discontent similarly informs contrarians’ positions on the climate issue (Lahsen, 2005b), forming a connection point between them and the more moderately skeptical mainstream scientists. An important subset of contrarian atmospheric scientists also similarly tend to be physicists or empiricists from fields such as geography, the discipline out of which traditional climatology and meteorology grew. See Table 1 for schematic representation of the differences in inclinations between these and other scientific subgroups.

Table 1.

Differences in Tendencies Between Mainstream Scientists, Skeptics, and Contrarians.

	Mainstream scientists	Mainstream skeptics	Contrarians
Question evidence of anthropogenic climate change	Only parts, at the most, not the theory as a whole	Moderately so, yes, including the theory as a whole	Strongly, categorically
Skeptical of many other issues of environmental concern (planetary limits, pollution, etc.)	No	No	Yes
Work in official scientific institutions (accredited universities/federal research laboratories)	Yes	Yes	In some cases/partly
Primary venue for writings/publications	Peer-reviewed scientific journals	Peer-reviewed scientific journals	Non-peer-reviewed outlets (newspapers, reports, blogs, etc.)
Material and discursive ties to conservative factions	No	No/rarely	Yes, always
Political values	Liberal	Liberal	Conservative

The Study of Culture in Global Environmental Change Research

Analyses of cultural dimensions of climate perceptions tend to follow and confirm the cultural theory framework initially developed by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1984). Focusing on individuals, they confirm the structuring role of core values identified in the cultural theory framework, namely, the extent to which individuals hold individualistic, hierarchical, commutarian, and egalitarian values. In line with other studies (for example, Douglas, Gasper, Ney, & Thompson, 1998; Leiserowitz, Maibach, & Roser-Renouf, 2010; Pendergraft, 1998; Silverman, 2010; Thompson & Rayner, 1998), Dan Kahan (2010) recently concluded that differences in these core values explain divergences in climate risk perceptions more completely than do differences in gender, race, income, educational level, political ideology, personality type, or any other individual characteristic:

People with individualistic values, who prize personal initiative, and those with hierarchical values, who respect authority, tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire. By contrast people who subscribe to more egalitarian and communitarian values are suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as sources of unjust disparity. They are thus more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted. (p. 296)

Anthony Leiserowitz et al. (2010) similarly note that these core values reflect individuals’ values, wishes, and preferences and influence the information to which they pay attention, how they evaluate data, and the conclusions they draw. They conclude that egalitarians, by contrast to individualists, are predisposed to perceive climate change as a serious risk and to support a variety of policies to address it.

The cultural theory framework appears to apply to climate contrarians: Analyses of the dozen or so high-profile “contrarian” U.S. scientists have identified their personal individualistic and conservative values (Lahsen, 1998, 2008; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). However, this article argues that the positions of climate contrarians as well as subgroups of skeptically inclined mainstream scientists also reflect cultural dispositions that transcend individual characteristics. Contrary to the tendency of research on the human dimensions of global environmental change (Proctor, 1998), analysts must thus look beyond individuals if they are to capture additional, important factors shaping scientists’ perceptions related to ACC; they must also probe deeper sociocultural dynamics involving human subgroups’ relationships with each other and the role of meanings rooted in subcultural experience and historical memory.

Typology

In my typology, “mainstream scientists” are scientists who, by contrast to “contrarian scientists,” work in official scientific institutions, mainly accredited universities and federal research laboratories; obtain research funding from government agencies; and publish primarily, if not exclusively, in scientific, peer-reviewed journals. Also in contrast to the contrarians, “mainstream skeptics” are moderate in their questioning of the science underpinning concern about human-induced climate change. They tend to believe that global climate has warmed and that human action may be one of the causes, but they question aspects of the evidence and are critical of what they perceive as exaggerations of the threat of ACC and of its scientific certainty. Unlike contrarians, they tend not to challenge the evidence for other environmental problems like ozone depletion and acid rain, and they lack extensive material and discursive ties to the vested interests and conservative think tanks that propel the antienvironmental movement. They also lack the strong, explicit aversion to government regulation held by most contrarians. Application of these definitions is admittedly difficult and ambiguous in some instances, as a few atmospheric scientists may show characteristics of more than one of these categories.

Identifying and seeking to overcome the limitations of individual particularism dominating human dimensions research on global environmental change, James Proctor advocates a “strong” culture-focused approach (Proctor, 1998). Its key tenors are that the cultural contradictions generated by increasing recognition of ACC and other broad-scale human transformations of the global environment ought to be crucial objects of human dimensions inquiry, and that climate science itself needs to be studied for its sociocultural and political dimensions. Some 14 years since publication of Proctor’s article in one of the most prominent social science journals focused on global environmental change, few analysts have performed such “strong” analysis in the area of global environmental change. Through acts of abstraction and avoidance, climate science continues to appear as if independent of the (culturally laden) specificities of human experience that mark both its production and reception (Demeritt, 2011; Jasanoff, 2010; Lahsen, 2010). Reflecting and perpetuating this, social science in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tends to be limited to adaptation, vulnerability, and economic studies, reducing such research to human responses to changes in natural environments (Demeritt, 2009), and the IPCC reports hardly even mention values (Duraiappah, 2010); nor do they recognize critical theory and science studies inspired critiques. For their part, social scientists are slow and uncoordinated in responding to calls for research on specifically cultural dimensions shaping climate science and maintaining the associated policy gridlock, including the coproduction of IPCC science and society (Lahsen, 2010). Yet effective policy responses may hinge on attention to cultural dimensions best unearthed through research in the nonpositivist, interpretive humanities and in the social sciences, integrating a critical reading of the natural sciences (Hulme, 2008, 2009).

Also due to the abovementioned tendencies, cultural theory has not been significantly developed and complemented with cultural explanations focused on the role of lived experience or “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1991). Habitus refers to the habits and inclinations—manifest in thoughts and behavior—that are inculcated in individuals through their interactions and surroundings. Individuals’ habiti are shaped by situated experiences of social processes and structures that engender a sense of what is appropriate in particular circumstances and what is not, making certain ways of behaving and responding seem right, others not.

Always sutured at the intersection of multiple identities (Mouffe, 1988), individuals are shaped by a multiplicity of factors variously individual, cultural, social and historical in nature. Any given individual’s behavior is overdetermined by a mix of idiosyncratic and shared (e.g., cultural) factors, and climate skepticism is similarly overdetermined (for evidence and discussion of such overdetermination in a specific case, see Lahsen, 2008). Accordingly, and due to space limitations, the following analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive, limiting its focus to the role of scientific values and experiences related to GCMs in structuring contrarian and mainstream skeptics’ attitudes and engagements related to ACC.

Habiti and Transformations in Science

The atmospheric sciences have witnessed an increasing dependence on GCMs along with changing criteria for evaluating what constitutes good and worthwhile science, in line with the emergence of Mode 2 science. Gibbons et al. (1994) use the terms “Mode 1” and “Mode 2” to describe the old and emergent forms of knowledge production that mark science today. They identify knowledge production in the traditional mode in science (Mode 1) as discipline-based, as involving a clear distinction between fundamental and applied science, and as placing greatest value on basic research, the latter being understood as a necessary precursor for applied science and engineering. Pure theory, physics, and mathematics serve as the ideals in this mode, in which searches for first principles and a unitary theory of the world are primary goals. Good science is equated with that which allows prediction and control with high precision and single-variable measurement and manipulation where possible.

Mode 2 science is less traditional in its production and evaluation of knowledge. It involves weakening, if not erasure, of long-standing disciplinary boundaries and of common distinctions between fundamental and applied science, including the value system that traditionally has privileged the former.⁴ Knowledge in this mode is often produced with clear policy goals in mind, and notions of good science are expanded to include recognition of practical, societal, and policy-related impacts. Actors operating in Mode 2 manifest greater awareness of the broader implications of their work. The search for first principles is a less primary or exclusive driver of research than is interest in understanding concrete systems and processes and addressing issues of societal concern.

Important federal agencies’ funding criteria have shifted increasingly in favor of Mode 2 science since the end of the cold war. In the environmental sciences, the new criteria of evaluation are closely linked to environmental concern as well as societal demands for “socially relevant” science, all of which privileges research on ACC, for which GCMs are an essential tool. This underlies much of modelers’ current success in obtaining funding and broad-based recognition of their scientific products.

As an important tool by which to explore concrete environmental problems involving complex, interlinked processes requiring multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, climate modeling bears strong characteristics of Mode 2. Climate scientists stress the Mode 2 aspects of their science—most notably its direct and beneficial social impact—when doing so serves their need to secure financial resources and other types of support. Scientists can choose to present themselves in either of the two modes depending on time and audience, wherefore the two modes are best understood as ideal types that, in practice, are constantly shifting rhetorical demarcations rather than essences. Nevertheless, they capture important recent and ongoing transformations in science, and some lines of research more easily lend themselves to being presented in line with the Mode 2 criteria of worth that increasingly mark national funding decisions.

In a clear articulation of Mode 2 values in interviews with me, the late Stephen Schneider, proponent of policy-driven, interdisciplinary climate modeling, expressed his lack of interest in “an elegant solution.” He unequivocally defended seeking answers to pressing social problems by any means necessary, including imprecise science:

The other side says “[if you put] garbage in[to the model], garbage [comes] out; if you haven’t got all the details, how can you couple everything together.” And my answer is: [if you don’t and instead wait until more precise data is available for input in the models] by the time you get that, we’ll already know the answer because you just go outside and see what happened. And that is not ethical in my value system.

Schneider also clearly expressed his opinion that while “Knowledge for its own sake is fine, too . . . that should only get a smaller fraction of the pie.”

Core Contrarians: The Physicist Trio

At the discursive level, if not always in their actions (given their extensive efforts to mobilize science in service of commercial and political interests), a physicist elite forming an influential subset of the high-profile contrarian scientists strongly represents Mode 1 values. In the context of climate science, these values are expressed in criticisms of the environmental sciences and, in particular, of climate modeling. The physicist elite that joined under the conservative Washington, D.C.–based think tank the Marshall Institute was led for over a decade by the now-deceased Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow—scientists who have been extraordinarily active and influential in the climate backlash (Lahsen, 2008; Oreskes & Conway, 2010) and who continue to serve as authorities for skeptical arguments, even after their deaths and even outside of the United States.⁵ As in the case of still-living colleagues of similar profile, the Marshall Institute physicist trio’s discourses, values, and habiti were formed before the contemporary wave of environmentalism, at a time when communism was perceived as a dominant threat and nuclear physicists enjoyed the highest prestige in the scientific hierarchy (Lahsen, 2008).

Defenders of basic science and with a value framework squarely rooted in the postwar decades and the cold war mentality, the trio was at odds with the emerging environmental consciousness and the associated new social movements that gained force during the 1970s.⁶ Concomitant with these transformations, their social status and influence declined, as did funding for the lines of science they valued. Meanwhile, climate modeling and other lines of science developed that they considered inferior science. Dismay over these changes informs their backlash engagements, which were acts of resistance to changing tides in science and society and a defense of their understandings of science, modernity, and of themselves as a physicist elite (Lahsen, 2008).

Modeling assumed an ever more central place in federal science funding and in the environmental sciences, propelled by concerns about environmental threats that the trio found exaggerated and largely fictitious. Adding to the fire, the concerns were advanced by a coalition of actors that also rejected the nuclear technology that they and their mentors helped develop and judged important to national security and economic prosperity (Lahsen, 2008; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

In a 1995 interview, Frederick Seitz’s arguments reflected the shaping role of scientific values in his positions, values at odds with the rise of climate modeling and in line with the traditional (Mode 1) scientific paradigm. Seitz explicitly opposed himself to modelers—whom he portrayed as opportunistic technicians—and criticized models as “not necessarily tied to observations out there, in the global world”:

It started with the same group that in the 70s was warning us of a new ice-age. They got a lot of publicity and then they seized on global warming—and got a lot of publicity. Also, they became well-funded for computer research, for computer modeling. . . . I associate the original outburst—if you want to call it that—with a man called Schneider who is on the Stanford faculty. He’s a brilliant computer operator.

The label “computer operator” is an insult in Seitz’s value hierarchy, which celebrates basic science and elegant solutions in the form of equations. Seitz divided into three groups the ACC believers with whom he differed, in the process describing computer modelers as diverging from “standard procedure” in science:

SEITZ:

To put it into groups, there are true-believers . . . who believe the world is coming to an end, they enjoy the publicity. . . . And, there is a group of people that look for power, [by saying] that we should live according to this life-style rather than living a life-style because we think it is the right one. . . .

LAHSEN:

You see scientists doing this?

SEITZ:

Scientists joined by others. Then you have a group of people who are enjoying good funding for ingenious experiments with computers. They call them experiments, but they are not tied necessarily to observations out there, in the real world. And of course they would like to see their funding continue, so they find it convenient. Whether a given person fits within one of those three categories or another is often hard to judge. But, I come out of the traditional attitude towards science that ultimately you have to use observations as your base, then combine it with speculation and theory, then see where you come out. To date, there is no significant evidence that we’re in impending danger.

In line with the abovementioned Cato Institute representative, Seitz thus rejected the epistemological status of GCM output as data.

Seitz expressed his support of science policy that marked the decades following the Second World War. By contrast to the present, in his rendition, but belied by scholarly analysis,⁷ funding priorities were then made on the basis of “needs of science” without much regard to “political issues.”

Seitz further described the scientists with whom he associated himself: scientists who value and practice traditional scientific techniques, by contrast to climate modelers:

SEITZ:

Please understand that I am part of an extended, international group [of people] who has the same feeling—that we’ve got to use the methods of good science on these issues.

LAHSEN:

Do you want to expand on that? Who are these people?

SEITZ:

Well, we come out of the traditional base of science, which is, you know, the techniques of science that have been built up with great care and sharpness over centuries. The ultimate resolve of issues is experiment. . . .

LAHSEN:

When you say you want to use good science, what is it that proponents of global warming do that you don’t agree with? Where do they diverge from what you call traditional science?

SEITZ:

They are doing computer runs, which often disagree violently with the observations. And they then rush out to the press, the media, claiming this or that, without proper scientific justification. . . .

LAHSEN:

Okay so again, the science that is being done right now, you say that it is not good science because it is not based enough on observations, right?

SEITZ:

That’s right

LAHSEN:

So, inherently about models, you would say that it is not a very scientific method?

SEITZ:

Yes.

Seitz placed climate models at the center of his science-focused attacks and, as already evidenced in a quote above, especially criticized the late Stephen Schneider, a scientist representing a kind of science and a set of values in strong conflict with his own. In his biography (Seitz, 1994, p. 382), Seitz similarly expressed dismay at a statement known to have been made by Schneider, describing it as a reflection of “extremists’ prejudices” and of an attitude “not uncommon at the present.”

Seitz lamented political correctness on U.S. university campuses, in particular the move away from Western classics towards multiculturalism. Asked how this related to our conversation, he linked the rise of computer modeling to new paradigms in science and society:

They say it is time for a whole new outlook. Science came out of Western civilization, which [they say] was bad—what we did to the Indians, and so forth. And in their view it is time to have a whole new approach. And maybe the computers are the solution . . . !

Criticisms of GCMs are especially strong among contrarians, where they mesh variously with neoconservative notions of the “New Class” and “political correctness.” Another source of such rhetoric is Hugh W. Ellsaesser, who represents another path to contrarianism found among an older generation of research meteorologists.

Demoted Research Meteorologists and Contrarianism

A theoretical research meteorologist specialized in radiation theory, Hugh W. Ellsaesser was already retired when I interviewed him on two separate occasions in the latter half of the 1990s. Early in his career around the Second World War, he was trained in synoptic methods and operational weather forecasting.

In public writings, Ellsaesser has similarly evoked the generational aspect, portraying both models and modelers as young and unreliable:

The optimum attributes for developing [climate models] are burning ambition and an uncluttered mind—which helps explain why most such models have been developed by graduate students. I do not believe that most of us would agree that such people are in general the ones who best understand how the atmosphere as a whole works. (Ellsaesser, 1989, p. 71)

In an interview, Ellsaesser expressed the less polemic criticism that the models have become black boxes. He noted that GCMs can be freely downloaded and used, yet come unaccompanied by documentation about underlying assumptions, simplifications, and biases they contain, undermining their meaningful use for scientific advancement.

Ellsaesser’s arguments show important convergences with conservative groups with which he also has associated, including the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. He shares with the latter a fearful emphasis on new international structures such as the United Nations, seeing ACC as a plot by which the United Nations propagates an ideology of political correctness and aims to take over the U.S. with a world government. Characteristic of the contrarians, Ellsaesser is skeptical with regards to many other environmental issues, including lead poisoning, air pollution, and the use of DDT. He understands environmentalism and other societal changes as a function of a generation gap after the baby boom that has undermined Americans’ ability to correctly perceive and solve problems (Ellsaesser, 1992).

The important factor of their politically conservative individual values apart, contrarians such as Seitz (a non-atmospheric physicist) and Ellsaesser (a theoretical meteorologist with past training in forecasting methods) share important elements of their criticisms, and elements of their scientific profile, with mainstream subgroups of skeptically inclined scientists. A common denominator linking Ellsaesser and a subset of more mainstream, skeptically inclined scientists, namely, an older generation of research meteorologists, is the fact of having been trained in weather forecasting early on their careers, at a time when forecasting was made using synoptic methods rather than numerical models. Ellsaesser identifies as weather officer and prominently lists his 21 years with the US. Air Force Air Weather Service among his credentials. What distinguishes Ellsaesser from his skeptically inclined fellow research meteorologists is his extreme conservatism.

Mainstream Empirical Meteorologists

Until the emergence of numerical approaches, meteorologists were divided into three broad groups: theoreticians, empiricists, and weather forecasters. Skeptically inclined climate critics within the atmospheric sciences tend to come from these three traditional groups and to hold criticisms of the epistemological status of numerical climate modeling and of how modeling results are being used in science and politics. Leaving aside weather forecasters, who were not part of my ethnographic research because I focused on research scientists, scientific critics of climate science and climate models tend to be empiricists (experimentalists, observationalists) and theoreticians (in meteorology, the theoretical, physics-trained meteorologists called “dynamicists”). In what follows, I will seek to account for this fact through analysis of historical and cultural factors shaping the relationships between these groups and climate modeling.

Representing a new hybrid form of scientific inquiry, climate modeling gradually assumed a central role in the atmospheric sciences, to the point of sidelining empiricists and theoreticians. At important U.S. research institutions such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the tasks of these two groups were increasingly made subservient to the climate modeling enterprise. Moreover, despite the need for all three groups—empiricists, theoreticians, and modelers (the latter initially mainly made up of young scientists with more mathematical know-how than knowledge of the actual atmosphere—to produce good models, in practice (i.e., as revealed through my fieldwork) empiricists and theoreticians felt that their knowledge and expertise were not always integrated into that enterprise. As illustrated through specific examples described below, a “fear of loss of thinking” in science informs these criticisms due to the overreliance of simulation technology, a fear also identified in historical research on nonenvironmental physicists (Galison, 1997, p. 733). Empiricists compared the insufficient empirical basis of some modeling efforts to “trying to drive a car without the wheels” and wanting to “place the roof on a house without walls.” Echoing their “extremely skeptical” fellow research meteorologists in the decades after the Second World War (Harper, 2003, p. 675), research meteorologists I encountered stressed that insufficient physical understanding structured the models (See Harper 2009).

Meteorological empiricists and theoreticians enjoy insight into weather and climate dynamics that informs their critical views of the models and of how climate modeling sometimes is carried out and results presented and used to inform environmental understanding and policy. They recognize that many modelers are good mathematicians but portray them, as one put it, as “so involved with running their models that they haven’t put the time in thinking how the atmosphere works.” Some modelers recognize a certain factual basis for some of these criticisms, noting a common inability or reluctance among modelers to recognize their models’ shortcomings (Lahsen, 2005a). The associated tensions reflect an epistemological issue characteristic of 20th-century science—the question of whether the best understanding of the atmosphere is gathered by “those who crunch the numbers, but never look outside,” or by those who don’t use equations but who “read the sky” (Harper, 2003, p. 689).

Indicative of the entrenchment that marks scientists’ positions on the climate issue, William (“Bill”) Gray, an empirical meteorologist I interviewed in the 1990s, has not changed his views significantly in subsequent years, at least with regards to ACC and GCM-based results: As reflected in an opinion piece he published in a newspaper in December 2010 (Gray, 2010), Gray persists in his questioning of both. Stressing the knowledge he has accumulated after a long career studying, forecasting and teaching “meteorology-climate,” he highlights other causal explanations for observed climate changes as more credible. Denying model-based projections of temperature changes on the order of 2 to 5 degrees Celsius credence, Gray describes GCMs’ representation of hydraulic dynamics as deeply flawed and producing “grossly unrealistic high warming numbers” (Gray, 2010).

In line with previous interviews with me, Gray expresses the sense of exclusion he and other research meteorologists have felt with the rise of the climate issue and claims broad-based support for his claim, writing: “Thousands of our country’s older and more experienced meteorologists have similar opinions as mine” and describing them all as “knowledgeable specialists” whose opinions “have yet to be included in broad, open and honest scientific debate of the likely influence on climate by rising levels of carbon dioxide” (Gray, 2010).

Another meteorologist of similar profile noted weather researchers’ sense of marginalization because the IPCC became the authority on climate change rather than the Working Group for Climate Change Detection unit that their leaders created in the mid- to late 1980s under the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Adding to the sting, members of the broader atmospheric research community discredited the unit’s authority on the climate issue, on the grounds that it was made up of bureaucrats and weather forecasters.⁸ With an element of humor, a research meteorologist I interviewed caricatured the feeling among his peers, saying “nobody loves [them] anymore and nobody knows the real atmosphere.”

For their specific, experience-based reasons, but similar to the contrarian physicist trio, older generation research meteorologists’ criticisms of climate models and reservations about the current level of preoccupation with ACC are thus often infused with a sense of alienation and regret about broad-based transformations in science and society since the cold war decades. They have witnessed increased internal strife and politicization of their field with the rise of environmental concern in the contexts of nuclear technology, global cooling, ozone depletion, and, more recently, ACC. The ones I interviewed were all environmentally concerned, but questioned the strong focus on ACC in science and society, noting other issues of concern, such as population growth and depletion of natural resources. But they were—mostly quietly so—uncomfortable about recent trends in science, including climate models and the IPCC. With characteristic ambivalence, they closely linked climate modeling with a lamented politicization of their field, while also acknowledging the particular power of the models as heuristics tools. What they react to, above all, are the uses of the models as truth-machines.

As in the case of the physicist subset of contrarians, members of this older generation of research meteorologists express scientific values in line with Mode 1 science. For example, one such meteorologist expressed being troubled by the IPCC, noting that its mode of operating diverges from “the traditional role of science,” according to which hypotheses are rigorously tested: “The IPCC doesn’t aggressively seek to disprove its own hypothesis. The thrust of the IPCC is to look for the social and political consensus. I find that really troubling. It’s really different. . . .”

Like the contrarians, skeptically inclined mainstream meteorologists I interviewed often singled out Stephen Schneider in their criticism of new trends in science. One of them described public statements by Schneider as “a sequence of ‘if’s’ and ‘could’s: ‘if this and if that . . . could lead to . . .’ etc.,” including his subsequent qualifying statement that the consequences of the hypothesized event could have either beneficial or dire consequences. He criticized this as lacking content and scientific rigor: “There is nothing there, right?!!” Reflecting a Mode 1 conception of scientists as best when staying clear (“clean”) of policy or political considerations, and underscoring again the generational dimension⁹ of the GCM criticisms, he said,

[Schneider] always puts a spin on things. And who listens to him? The kids who are going to get environmental science degrees and who are going to need jobs, they listen. The ones who want to save the planet, they want to be part of this. Politicians listen . . . these scientists are their support staff. . . . But you just don’t do the if-if-if, if you want to be clean. The bottom line is how well your science compares to reality.

Adding pain to injury, nonmodeling meteorologists frequently found their access to research funds greatly reduced, if not entirely cut, with the emergence of GCMs and concern about ACC, especially when their research proposals were not designed to confirm or otherwise advance the theory of ACC. Meteorologists who worked with the less quantitative synoptic methodologies also found their methods demoted. For purposes of forecasting, the synoptic methods were replaced by numerical weather forecasting, which were celebrated for their superiority. They had to acknowledge that the computers were better in important respects, and they appreciated how the computers made some of their former, tedious tasks unnecessary, particularly the practice of manually plotting data onto weather maps. And a need for expert interpretation of model output maintained a space for their expertise, albeit a smaller one. They have thus largely stopped fighting the changes of time, though they quietly continue to harbor ambivalent feelings about how environmentalism has changed their field and how sophisticated computerized methods miss some insights into complexities and dynamics that their scientifically trained human minds are better capable of grasping by drawing on physics knowledge, experience and a feeling for how the atmosphere works. With the rise of numerical methods in meteorology, their so-called more “subjective” methods lost esteem, however.

Other Skeptically Inclined Empirical Meteorologists: Weather Forecasters

Weather forecasters are different from the older generation research meteorologists in that they generally do not have PhDs. Present-day weather forecasters’ professional training and practice—and, thus, their perspective and subculture—overlap partly with those of the above-described older empirical research meteorologists (henceforth referred to simply as empirical meteorologists). One connecting point is their training in synoptic methods of weather analysis and forecasting. Culture- and attitude-wise, empirical meteorologists I interviewed noted a partial overlap, highlighting in particular what they described as the humbling experience and subsequent model-skepticism forecasters learn by daily seeing their forecasts proven wrong. They noted that modelers fail to be similarly humbled when producing forecasts for climates set in the distant future. Models are validated by “hindcasts,” but the latter’s semblance with observations can also be an artifact of superficial adjustments (“tuning”) to make models resemble past and present climates (Lahsen, 2005a).

Skepticism with regards to the theory of ACC is “more the rule than the exception” among TV meteorologists and weathercasters (Dawson, 2008). A recent survey of nearly 600 broadcast meteorologists found that only half of them believe that global warming is happening, and only a yet smaller subset believes that it is anthropogenic rather than due to natural variability (Wilson, 2009). The finding captured widespread attention, reinforced by recognition of broadcast meteorologists’ important influence on public opinion.

Culturally loaded tensions and resentments, and expert knowledge, appear to underpin weather forecasters’ positions as well. Their expertise on climate issues is often dismissed by academic scientists, and their skepticism explained as reflections of personal biases and ignorance, without accompanying evidence.¹⁰ Yet forecasters’ formal training now also includes subjects such as the IPCC and long-range climate projections (Dawson, 2008). A senior educator of broadcast forecasters at Penn State University described the disagreements between these forecasters and climate scientists as “a jurisdictional war.” He mentioned the “disdain” in “the orthodox scientific research community” for “those who are not smart enough to get a Ph.D. or do research, and instead go into the fluff of television and just forecast the weather.” Inversely, he identified a disdain among television meteorologists “for those who pontificate about what their [climate] models show” (Dawson, 2008). A broadcast meteorologist also related the skepticism of “quite a few” colleagues to their experiences of having “asked questions and raised issues and been told to be quiet, [and to accept that ACC] is the truth.” He suggested that weather forecasters may resist such pressures because they “know things change that don’t necessarily have to do with global warming,” such as the fact that the location of certain sensors has changed, compromising the consistency of data used to detect climate trends.

Theoretical Meteorologists

Theoretical meteorologists (“dynamicists”) appeared in my research as a mainstream subgroup inclined to question GCM output. This subgroup also highlighted generational differences and identified with those of the “older school” who had been trying for a good many years to get a kind of conceptual model of how the climate system works before, in the words of one of them, “the modelers came along and said, ‘It’s hopeless to do it that way. We’re just going to have to simulate rather than understand.’”

Contrasting himself to modelers—and to those whom he called “catastrophists” and the “CO₂ folks”—a mainstream dynamicist (interviewed in 1995) explicitly identified with a “group of critics,” with physicists, and with “the school that believes that the climate is an extraordinarily stable system.” He perceived a warming trend in global data but judged it to be roughly half a degree and thus far below model estimates of 6 or so degrees, contesting the right of anyone “to say something like that is reliable when all it takes into account is one factor among many others” and when it omits important systemic feedbacks.

Dynamicists were less personally and negatively impacted by the rise of GCMs compared to the empirical meteorologists. They largely continued to benefit from the prestige theoretical knowledge endows in science, and their criticisms tend to reflect a subtle sense of superiority in relation to the GCM enterprise, which they associate with engineering and criticize for its weak base in physics-based understanding of the phenomena being modeled. In a similar expression of superiority, dynamicists I interviewed sometimes expressed feeling “ashamed” about IPCC practices and the ACC “hype” in their field, as contrarian dynamicist Richard Lindzen did in the backlash TV documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy.

Demonstrating the moderation and complex thinking characteristic of mainstream skeptics, mainstream theoretical meteorologists showed moderation in their environmental skepticism and did not categorically dismiss a longer list of environmental issues. Some made a point of expressing disagreement with the “wide antiscience movement” that they identified with the U.S. Republican party. While indirectly defending nuclear technology by questioning contemporary environmentalist fears of it, the abovementioned mainstream dynamicist was similarly moderate, agreeing that it makes sense for non-ACC-related reasons to reduce CO₂ emissions. Showing the cool, intellectual detached questioning of popular perceptions I commonly found among physicists, including the contrarian trio, this dynamicist framed contemporary fear of nuclear technology in terms of past, unfounded fears of technology now deemed safe: “it is sometimes worthwhile looking in the rear mirror. When the first steam engine boat was developed, people were so afraid of it. It wasn’t allowed into [some] harbors. People were afraid it might explode.”

Historical Memory

Historical memory is a connecting point between the contrarian and mainstream critics also because older members of both camps have witnessed model promoters’ past tendencies to make unwarranted claims on the basis of uncertain model results, claims later discredited upon reevaluation and refinement of the models, techniques, and assumptions employed. A case in point was model results associated with the 1983 TTAPS study of the environmental consequences of nuclear war, a study named after the first letter of each of the authors’ last names (Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, & Sagan, 1984). The GCMs predicted a 35 degree Celsius temperature drop, results strongly defended by high-profile scientists. Astronomer Carl Sagan said, “I do not think that our results are dependent on some quirk internal to the computer program” (Ehrlich, Sagan, Kennedy, & Orr Roberts, 1984, p. 36), and biologist Paul R. Ehrlich expressed “a great deal of confidence” in them (Ehrlich et al., 1984, p. 70). Yet using a newer, more complex dynamic model, Schneider and his colleague Starley Thompson later reduced the projected temperature change, coining the term “nuclear fall” to replace the prediction of a nuclear winter (Schneider & Thompson, 1988).

Importantly, this incident and the downgrading of the nuclear winter threat happened between 1986 and 1988, increasing GCM skepticism in some quarters immediately before climate modeler James Hansen brought concern about ACC to new heights when testifying before the U.S. Congress that ACC already was responsible for damaging climate extremes. Personally invested in nuclear technology, the Marshall Institute physicists had particular reasons for resenting critics of nuclear technology. However, the nuclear winter episode also reinforced skepticism among nonmodeling mainstream empirical and theoretical meteorologists. In interviews, some expressed having grown skeptical after hearing the continuous but changing “scare of the month” emanating over the years from modelers, chemists, and their cohorts.

In the British TV “backlash” documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy, the political actors behind the movie obtained footage of mainstream skeptics criticizing climate science and the climate models in particular, which were a central pillar of attack in the documentary. Reginald Newell, an MIT-based empirical meteorologist, was shown saying, “I don’t know why they take models seriously.” Following this, the two advocates of concern about climate change, atmospheric scientists and GCM-users Stephen Schneider and Tom Wigley, are shown saying that they do not give much attention to data. Richard Lindzen is also featured dismissing the evidence of ACC and expressing concern about the politicization of his field. In this way, as in other, subsequent efforts, the backlash coalition captured—and took advantage of—the tensions that exist within mainstream atmospheric scientists around the relative value of models and observational data.

Conclusion

This analysis identifies both differences and continuities between contrarians and mainstream skeptically inclined scientists. Besides their staunch conservatism, contrarian scientists articulate especially strongly culturally laden criticisms of transformations in the sciences associated with a new age characterized by rising environmentalism and a new mode of knowledge production (Mode 2 science). For reasons rooted in the particularities of their knowledge, experience, and subcultures, older generation representatives of three subgroups—theoretical and empirical research meteorologists, in addition to weather forecasters—show particular inclinations to question elements of climate science, in particular climate models. These three groups traditionally made up the field of meteorology and have a noncommitted—and sometimes even a somewhat alienated and antagonistic—relationship to modeling, which conditions their skepticism toward ACC. This skepticism has facilitated backlash instigators’ efforts to enroll some of them in campaigns, a few as full-fledged contrarians.

It is noteworthy that contrarian scientists tend to be empiricists and physicists (i.e., theoreticians). Empiricists include Robert Balling and Sherwood Idso, among others, and the Marshall Institute trio were physicists, as are Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. Richard Lindzen is a theoretical meteorologist, while Patrick Michaels is an observational meteorologist.

Confirming the cultural theory framework, analyses of high-profile U.S. contrarian scientists suggest the important role of their individualistic and conservative values in their choice to join the antienvironmental movement. In their case and that of largely ignored and understudied subgroups of skeptically inclined mainstream scientists, however, other important cultural dynamics are also at work. Illuminating the extent to which particularities of scientists’ training, experiences and historical memories underpin their skepticism, this case study has illustrated the usefulness of also integrating attention to the differentiated conditions and experiences of modernity and critical analysis of climate knowledge itself. Both offer insight into the politics of global environmental change. Analysis of scientists’ differentiated experiences tied to the rise of climate modeling and concern about ACC shows experience-based factors affecting perceptions of ACC, factors that cultural theory thus far has not taken sufficiently into account. Supporting Proctor’s “strong theory,” this article thus suggests that understanding of the cultural underpinnings of divergent perceptions of ACC requires analyses that integrate, but also move beyond, the focus on individualistic, hierarchical, and egalitarian values that characterize applications of the cultural theory framework.

The habiti (the knowledge and experiences, including scientific training) of the identified scientific subgroups structure their perceptions of climate modeling and of ACC. The scientific protagonists in the climate debate have been shaped, but differently, by various historical moments. The nonmodeling, older generation empirical meteorologists are particularly impacted by a sense of modernity’s characteristic “maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” that threatens to destroy everything that is known, everything that has been known, believed, and held dear (Berman, 1988, p. 15).

Further analysis is needed to confirm here-identified patterns in the scientific backgrounds of the skeptically inclined scientific subgroups and establish the size of the group they comprise. They may not be very numerous, and they are decreasingly active in science by force of their age. Many of the mainstream skeptics I encountered through fieldwork were near or past retirement age, and nonmodeling research meteorologists with backgrounds in synoptic methods are rare to find among newer generations of scientists. Nowadays, the synoptic methods are taught mainly to weather forecasters and rarely at the PhD level. Erasing the traditional division between theoreticians, empiricists, and modelers, most everyone receiving degrees in atmospheric science today ends up doing some level of modeling and is taught more theoretical knowledge than previous generations of empirical meteorologists. This could mean that the subcultural divisions between modelers, theoreticians, and empiricists gradually may disappear and possibly, with them, the here-identified associated antagonisms that underpin contemporary climate science–focused disagreements. Since weather forecasters were not a focus of my fieldwork, whether skepticism among them also reflects a generational dimension is unclear.

Advocates of concern over ACC are understandably likely to welcome the disappearance of the science-focused divisions, considering how the latter contributes to policy gridlock. However, it is important to recognize the potential benefit of mainstream skeptics’ critical perspectives: to the extent that skeptics’ views reflect expertise- and experience-driven insights and highlight the “less rosy underbelly” of the climate science enterprise that IPCC leaders and advocates are unlikely to acknowledge (and the emails released in association with so-called Climategate reveal such reluctance), societies may be well served by some level of diversity of opinion beyond that which exists within the IPCC, in line with democratic theory (Brown, 2009) and the anthropological principle of societal resilience through diversity of perspectives (Schwarz & Thompson, 1990).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kristine C. Harper for helpful comments on this article, and I also sincerely thank the scientists who gave me of their time, agreeing to be interviewed and share their perspectives and experiences with me.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research data presented here was supported by a predissertation grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant # R34390 SBR-9423458), a STAR graduate fellowship from the Environmental Protection Agency, and postdoctoral fellowships at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The writing phase was supported by the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil.

Notes

Author Biography

Myanna Lahsen is Senior Researcher in the Earth System Science Center of the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE) and executive editor for the domain on The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge in the review journal WIREs Climate Change. Her research focuses on the sociology of U.S. and Brazilian knowledge politics and policy related to global environmental change, development and environmental sustainability.

References

Anderegg

W. R. L.

(2010). Most cited authors on climate change. Retrieved on December 10, 2012 from http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/skeptic_authors_table.html.

Azevedo

J. C. D.

(2008, October 13). Qual temperature? Folha de São Paulo.

Berman

(1988). All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Bourdieu

(1991). Language and symbolic power ( Thompson

J. B.

, Ed.) ( Raymond

Adamson

Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brown

M. B.

(2009). Science in democracy: Expertise, institutions, and representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dawson

(2008). Why are so many TV meteorologists and weathercasters climate “skeptics”? The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media. Retrieved from http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2008/06/why-are-so-many-tv-meteorologists-and-weathercasters-climate-skeptics/

Demeritt

(2009). Geography and the promise of integrative environmental research. Geoforum, 401, 127–129.

Demeritt

(2011). Book review symposium: Commentary 1. Progress in Human Geography, 35(1), 132–134.

Douglas

Gasper

Ney

Thompson

(1998). Human needs and wants. In Rayner

Malone

E. L.

(Eds.), Human choice and climate change (Vol. 1, pp. 195–263). Columbus, OH: Batelle.

10.

Douglas

Wildavsky

(1984). Risk and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

11.

Dunlap

R. E.

McCright

A. M.

(2010). Climate change denial: Sources, actors and strategies. In Lever-Tracy

(Ed.), Routledge handbook of climate change and society (pp. 240–259). London: Routledge.

12.

Duraiappah

(2010). Social sciences in intergovernmental processes. Presentation presented at the Changing Nature, Changing Science? Symposium, International Social Science Council and CIPSH, Nagoya, Japan.

13.

Ehrlich

P. R.

Sagan

Kennedy

Orr Roberts

(1984). The cold and the dark: The world after nuclear war. New York: Norton.

14.

Ellsaesser

H. W.

(1989). Response to Kellogg’s paper. In Singer

S. F.

(Ed.), Global climate change: Human and natural influences (pp. 67–80). New York, NY: Paragon House.

15.

Ellsaesser

H. W.

(1992). Global 2000 revisited: Mankind’s impact on spaceship Earth. New York, NY: ICUS (distributor: Paragon House).

16.

Forman

(1987). Behind quantum electronics: National security as a basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 18(1), 149–229.

17.

Galison

(1997). Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

18.

Gibbons

Limoges

Nowotny

Schwartzman

Scott

Trow

(1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

19.

Gray

(2010, December 21). The Coloradoan. Retrieved from http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201012210302

20.

Harper

K. C.

(2003). Research from the boundary layer: Civilian leadership, military funding and the development of numerical weather prediction (1946-55). Social Studies of Science, 333, 667.

21.

Hulme

(2008). Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(1), 5–11.

22.

Hulme

(2009). Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Jasanoff

(2010). A new climate for society. Theory, Culture & Society, 277, 233–253.

24.

Kahan

(2010). Fixing the communications failure. Nature, 463, 296.

25.

Kevles

(1990). Cold war and hot physics: Science, security, and the American state, 1945-56. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 20(Part 2), 239–264.

26.

Lahsen

(1998). Climate rhetoric: Constructions of climate science in the age of environmentalism. PhD thesis. Rice University, Houston, Texas: UMI Dissertation Services, A Bell & Howell Company.

27.

Lahsen

(1999). The detection and attribution of conspiracies: The controversy over Chapter 8. In Marcus

G. E.

(Ed.), Paranoia within reason: A casebook on conspiracy as explanation (Late Editions 6, Cultural Studies for the End of the Century, pp. 111–136). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Lahsen

(2005a). Seductive simulations: Uncertainty distribution around climate models. Social Studies of Science, 35, 895–922.

29.

Lahsen

(2005b, Winter). Technocracy, democracy and U.S. climate science politics: The need for demarcations. Science, Technology and Human Values, 30(1), 137–169.

30.

Lahsen

(2008). Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist “trio” supporting the conservative backlash against global warming. Global Environmental Change, 18(1), 204–219.

31.

Lahsen

(2010). The social status of climate change knowledge. WIREs Climate Change, 1(2), 162–171.

32.

Leiserowitz

Maibach

Roser-Renouf

(2010). Climate change in the American mind: Americans’ global warming beliefs and attitudes in January 2010. Yale Project on Climate Change, Yale University and George Mason University. Retrieved from http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/AmericansGlobalWarmingBeliefs2010.pdf

33.

Mouffe

(1988). Hegemony and new political subjects. In Nelson

Grossberg

(Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 89–101). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

34.

Oreskes

Conway

E. M.

(2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

35.

Pendergraft

(1998). Human dimensions of climate change: Cultural theory and collective action. Climatic Change, 39, 643–663.

36.

Proctor

J. D.

(1998). The meaning of global environmental change: Retheorizing culture in human dimensions research. Global Environmental Change, 8(3), 227–248.

37.

Schneider

S. H.

Thompson

S. L.

(1988). Simulating the climatic effects of nuclear war. Nature, 333, 221–227.

38.

Schwarz

Thompson

(1990). Divided we stand: Redefining politics, technology and social choice. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

39.

Seitz

(1994). On the frontier: My life in science. New York, NY: American Institute of Physics.

40.

Silverman

(2010). Climate, worldviews and cultural theory. People and Place, 1(2). Retrieved from http://www.peopleandplace.net/media_library/image/2010/3/9/climate_worldviews_and_cultural_theory

41.

Stokes

D. E.

(1997). Pasteur’s quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

42.

Thompson

Rayner

(1998). Cultural discourses. In Rayner

Malone

E. L.

(Eds.), Human choice and climate change (Vol. 1, pp. 265–343). Columbus, OH: Batelle.

43.

Turco

R. P.

Toon

Ackerman

Pollack

Sagan

(1984). Nuclear winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions. Science, 222(4630), 1284.

44.

Wilson

(2009). Opportunities and obstacles for television weathercasters to report on climate change. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 90, 1457–1465.